Monday, October 3, 2011

The Devil's in the (Silent) Details

David Warren writes that while everyone's eyes are front and centre on the personalites running in the Ontario election and their petty party platforms, the really important stuff--the stuff that's impairing our societal health--is happening behind the scenes:

The legacy issues — the more permanent damage this government has done over two terms in office — are in the regulatory sphere. This work is largely invisible, from day to day, because it consists of innumerable small regulatory revisions done by order-in-council and through departmental fiat, flying almost entirely under the radar of the legislature. The measures are known only to the most assiduously specialized readers of the Ontario Gazette, or finally to the isolated victims.

Almost every item is a small, incremental, bracket-creep of political correctitude — advancing the “human rights” industry, the family law industry, the adjustment of medical priorities, the environmental review industry, the indoctrination of schoolchildren, the destruction of traditional symbols and established ways of doing things. Each little creeping regulation locks in exactly the sort of changes that publicly-funded progressive activists have targeted and lobbied for behind the scenes — without the fondest chance of public oversight and review.

This, to my mind, is the cancer that has been metastasizing through the body politic, for two generations now: the cumulative growth and spread of politically-correct bureaucratic cells, while our attention is given over almost entirely to money considerations, questions of personality and image, and the weather from day to day.